Brian Dunlop was born in Sydney, the son of British parents who had emigrated because of the Great Depression. He later described his father as “a bit of a Calvinist”. On leaving school after the Intermediate Certificate in 1954 he was awarded a scholarship to the state-funded National Art School in Darlinghurst, which meant that his parents encouraged his studies as a way of escaping his working class origins.
He instinctively used the human scale as a way of defining space and proportion, which meant that he readily absorbed the Charm School style promoted by the school’s teachers. Dunlop’s fine drawing style and carefully modulated tonality won him considerable attention in the earlier part of his career. In 1958, the year he completed art school, he was awarded the Le Gay Brereton Prize for drawing, and in 1962 had his first work (a drawing) purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The same year he travelled to Europe, where he spent most of his time in Italy but also travelled to Greece, Majorca, North Africa and London. He returned to Australia convinced that the humanist values of the Renaissance artists were the right ones to guide his future career.
For some years Dunlop was able to supplement his income as an artist with teaching part-time at the National Art School. When that was downgraded to a technical college in the 1970s, he taught at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. Formal teaching ended in 1980 when he became artist in residence at the University of Melbourne. The following year he was awarded the Sulman Prize for his painting of the interior of the Old Physics Building.
Dunlop divided his time between Sydney and Ebenezer in NSW and Panton Hill and Port Fairy in Victoria. His careful compositions, where people are defined by their context made him especially popular as a portrait painter. He was not especially enamoured of portrait commissions, preferring to concentrate on landscapes, still lives and architectural interiors, and was known to dismiss portraits as “hack work”.
For some commissions however, he travelled. In 1984 he travelled to London, to paint the official Victorian Sesquicentenary portrait of queen Elizabeth. The Queen wears in a bright yellow dress, sitting in front of a white panelled door, balanced by and intricate golden patterned wallpaper. It is clear that he sees her body as an element in an overall composition, and it is no surprise to discover that while she only had brief sittings for the portrait, he spent a great deal of time painting the wallpaper. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Dunlop’s royal portrait is an especially satisfying work.
In his later years Brian Dunlop was one of a small group of artists fostered by Eva Breuer, and exhibited regularly with her until his death.
- Writers:
-
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 2007
- Last updated:
- 2015
